Fellow churn solution seekers: as a CS Leader, I've been exploring the world of churn prediction tools to help tackle one of the greatest challenges in customer retention.
In this article, I'll be sharing my research findings with different churn prediction tools, putting together a comprehensive review of their strengths, features and limitations. Join me in this journey to understand the state of the market, analyze solutions, and identify criteria that fit your needs. Let’s dive in!
1. Planhat
Planhat is a customer success platform. It's feature set helps to grow NRR, and make CS teams more efficient.
Use cases: Customer success automation, Project management, Automation, Workflows, Analytics tracking, Collaboration.
Integrations: Comprehensive list of tools such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Segment, Intercom, Slack, Zapier and more.
Free trial: No.
Pricing: Contact the vendor for pricing. Expect starting from ~$25k/year. Unlimited seats on every plan.
Planhat tackles churn by enabling customer health scoring, identifying trends (e.g. reduced product usage), and automating triggers based on that data.
For example, you can set up playbooks to automatically assign tasks to CSMs when a customer becomes "unhealthy".
The platform enables tracking of important metrics like churn and net retention. It provides a user-friendly interface for slicing data by cohort, viewing development over time, and forecasting future churn and expansion. This helps businesses assess the health of their renewal base and plan confidently for the future.
Finally, the reporting aspect enables users to visualize and present data in a meaningful way, allowing them to tell stories and make data-driven decisions. Planhat's comprehensive platform, customer data integration, and analytical capabilities can be leveraged to help identify churn indicators and predict customer attrition.
2. Baremetrics
Baremetrics is a SaaS analytics platform that provides a solution for accurately predicting sales and revenue.
Use cases: Forecasting, Customer Insights, Analytics API, Segmentation, Cancellation insights, Benchmarks.
Integrations:
Free trial: Yes, 14 days.
Pricing: The pricing is based on your current Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and additional modules can be added. Indicatively and for an $45,000 MRR annually:
- Metrics at $208/month – includes metrics tools, smart dashboards, benchmarks, data export, segmentation, and more.
- Recover at $158/month – helps combat failed payments by providing automated email reminders, customizable credit card forms, and in-app prompts.
- Cancellation Insights at $108/month – allows you to learn why customers cancel and provides personalized email questionnaires and automated follow-up emails.
With Baremetrics, businesses can effectively adjust their budget planning and resource allocations based on reliable forecasted data. With its user-friendly and hassle-free subscription approach, Baremetrics eliminates the need for guesswork in sales and revenue predictions.
By forecasting and identifying potential churn risks, businesses can take proactive steps to mitigate their impact, such as improving customer satisfaction and decreasing churn rate.
The platform offers access to precise forecasts on key customer success metrics, including active customers, upgrades, cancellations, and downgrades. All of this information is conveniently gathered and organized in a single location, making it easier for businesses to track and analyze their financial performance.
The platform allows you to look into historical financial data to accurately predict future revenue growth and identify potential business risks. Through reliable data analysis, businesses can make informed decisions on budget planning, staffing, and resource allocation.
3. Churn 360
Churn360 is an AI-driven customer success platform for SaaS businesses.
Use cases: Customer journey, Health monitoring, Customer retention, Upsell, Expansion.
Integrations: Wide variety of tools such as Hubspot, Jira, Segment and Intercom.
Free trial: No
Pricing: Depending on the number of CSM seats and customers, their plans start from $199/month to $499/month. They also offer a custom Enterprise plan for unlimited customers and 10 or more seats.
The Churn360 customer retention solution provides various features to help SaaS businesses reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value. The platform provides a 360-degree view of customers, enabling businesses to group customers based on attributes and automate customer success processes through Playbooks.
The Churn360 customer retention solution offers comprehensive resources, including guides, webinars, industry reports, and “churnopedia”, to support businesses in reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value.
The software monitors customers across their journey lifecycle and provides engagement through push notifications and surveys such as NPS, CES, and CSAT. The Health score feature, which tracks data points such as usage, survey results, support tickets, or even communication between the CSM and the customer, empowers businesses to identify at-risk customers.
Additionally, it enables customer success managers to be proactive in identifying customer issues and provides them with strategies to solve those issues before it's too late. The software's strength lies in its ability to help businesses retain customers by identifying those who have not received value from the product yet, tracking customer behavior using usage data as a key indicator, and providing extensive data-driven reports.
Overall, Churn360 offers a range of tools that can help businesses retain their customers more effectively.
4. ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a customer success platform which offers features that help predict renewals and identify churn risk.
Use cases: Customer success management, Renewals and churn risk forecasting, Surveys and sentiment analysis.
Integrations: Integrates with a plethora of apps from CRM to Finance and LMS.
Free trial: No
Pricing: Contact vendor for pricing.
ChurnZero's software enables businesses to keep a close eye on customers who are at risk of not renewing their subscriptions. By using Health Scores (referred to as ChurnScores), the tool can automatically trigger alerts, plays, and journeys to increase customer engagement and mitigate the risk of churn. This predictive capability helps businesses proactively address the needs of customers who may be considering leaving.
The tool also provides the ability to customize and launch surveys to capture customer sentiment throughout their engagements and various milestones in the customer lifecycle. These surveys can include NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), or custom questionnaires. Additionally, ChurnZero's In-App tools allow businesses to launch surveys directly within their platforms, making it easier for customers to participate and provide feedback.
At its core, ChurnZero is a CSM dashboard that allows managers to build customized views for their team. This dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of key metrics and information related to customer accounts, including onboarding status, open escalations, ChurnScores, upcoming renewals, and changes in ChurnScores. This feature helps CSMs stay organized and optimize their daily activities to ensure customer success.
See also: ChurnZero competitors & alternatives.
5. Gainsight
Gainsight offers a platform that helps businesses increase net revenue retention by unlocking the power of customer success.
Use cases: Customer 360 and Health, Journey Orchestration, Revenue Optimization, Customer Feedback.
Integrations: Marketplace with 60 integrations available for Analytics, CRM, Data Management and more.
Free trial: No
Pricing: 3 plans based on number of customers and features included. Contact vendor for a quote.
Gainsight's customer success software offers a range of strengths that empower businesses to drive value and improve customer retention. With robust Healthscores and a comprehensive 360-degree view of customers, Gainsight enables accurate churn prediction and proactive risk mitigation.
The software's automated playbooks and workflows facilitate quick action on sponsor changes and other risk factors. Engaging customer journeys combine human and digital touchpoints to ensure a personalized customer experience.
Additionally, Gainsight leverages AI-powered capabilities to provide better insights, such as predicting renewals and expansions. The software helps identify expansion opportunities and streamlines the renewal process allowing businesses to focus on the right opportunities at the right time. With strategic and prescriptive action plans, businesses can showcase achieved customer goals and drive successful outcomes.
Finally, Gainsight helps drive NPS (Net Promoter Score) and voice of customer programs. Hence, the tool provides insights into customer sentiment and engagement to accelerate value and retention.
See also: Gainsight competitors & alternatives.
6. Akkio
Akkio is an AI-powered data science platform that offers machine learning solutions to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
Use cases: Sales Forecasting, Performance Analytics, Churn Prediction, Data transformation.
Integrations: Hubspot, Snowflake, Big Query, Salesforce, Zapier, GSheets
Free trial: YES
Pricing: Based on rows of data and number of actions monthly their plans range from Starter plan 49/month to Business for $1,499/month. Contact them for a custom quote on the Enterprise plan.
Akkio offers a forecasting feature that allows businesses to predict future outcomes and trends based on historical data. The forecasting feature works by analyzing large data sets and uses machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and predict future trends. Businesses can use this feature to make informed decisions about their operations, forecast sales, optimize resources, and improve decision-making.
The software can assist in churn prediction by using its forecasting and performance features. Using historical data, the Akkio platform can identify patterns of customer behavior and use this information to predict when customers are about to churn. Moreover, Akkio is constantly training its machine learning models used for churn prediction to increase accuracy and reduce false positives.
Akkio's performance feature is designed to help businesses optimize machine learning models to achieve the best possible results. The platform provides businesses with tools to monitor the performance of their machine learning models, identify potential issues for the best output. The feature also enables businesses to understand how their models are performing and identify opportunities for improvement.
Overall, the Akkio platform provides businesses with powerful machine learning tools that can help them identify trends, forecast future performance for unmatched churn prediction and retention.
7. Custify
Custify is a customer success software tool for SaaS businesses. It offers various features and capabilities to support customer success and reduce churn.
Use cases: Customer Health, Portfolio Management, Customer Success Analytics, Churn Risk Prediction, Automated Workflows.
Integrations: Wide range of integrations with your favourite tools for analytics, billing, CRM, ticketing and more.
Free trial: No
Pricing: Contact vendor for pricing
Custify’s main purpose is to help businesses reduce churn, retain customers, and grow revenue. By offering a range of features and capabilities, it aims to support customer success efforts and drive overall business success.
One of the key aspects of Custify is its focus on ensuring product adoption and customer lifecycle management. The tool provides SaaS businesses with the ability to proactively manage their customers in real-time. It also offers automation features to streamline processes and improve efficiency. By integrating with existing company tools, Custify serves as a central hub for customer data and actionable tasks, making it easier to track customer interactions and engagement.
Custify provides valuable insights into customer health, enabling businesses to identify and predict churn risks. By defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and setting health scores, companies can assess the overall health of their customer portfolios. This helps them gain instant visibility into customer engagement and take proactive steps to reduce churn. By understanding the health of their customers, businesses can also identify upsell opportunities and increase revenue.
The Dashboards and Reports feature in Custify enables businesses to create customized dashboards to track customer success metrics and performance indicators. This allows for better visibility into customer behavior and health scores, ultimately aiding in making data-driven decisions. By reducing the time spent on manual data gathering and providing real-time insights, businesses can take proactive measures to reduce churn and drive customer success.
Overall, Custify offers SaaS businesses a comprehensive customer success software solution that helps drive customer engagement, reduce churn rates, and maximize revenue growth. By providing an all-in-one platform for customer data, actionable tasks, and analytics, Custify enables businesses to make informed decisions and take proactive steps in retaining and expanding their customer base.
8. Vitally
Vitally is a Customer Success platform that combines customer data with project management and work platforms to provide an all-in-one collaborative workspace.
Use cases: Productivity, Collaboration, Customer insights, Automated Workflows.
Integrations: Vitally offers its REST API and also provides a few out-of-the-box integrations such as Stripe, Looker, Zendesk, Outlook, Mixpanel, Slack and more.
Free trial: No
Pricing: Contact vendor for pricing.
In terms of churn prediction, Vitally provides real-time visibility by equipping teams with data alerts and reporting on customer interactions from across different systems. This allows teams to identify potential churn risks and take proactive measures to retain customers.
The tool offers several features to enhance productivity, including centralized capabilities like project management, notes, knowledge base, and automation. These features help teams stay organized, aligned, and efficient in their customer success efforts.
Vitally also emphasizes collaboration between customers and Customer Success teams. Through a shared workspace, customers can access important information, collaborate on projects, and have conversations with the Customer Success team, leading to enhanced customer experiences and increased time to value.
Vitally's strengths lie in its ability to aggregate customer data, provide actionable insights, and automate workflows. It integrates with various enterprise applications, allowing for the seamless syncing of customer data.
Overall, Vitally helps Customer Success teams operate with efficiency, improve Net Revenue Retention (NRR), deliver best-in-class customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions to predict and mitigate churn risks.
9. Churnly
Churnly.ai is an AI-powered customer churn software designed for B2B SaaS companies.
Use cases: Revenue Tracking, Churn Risk Analytics, Customer Lifecycle, Customer Retention.
Integrations: Relatively limited in volume, but powerful integrations with Magento, Zendesk, Segment, Hubspot, Intercom, Stripe and more.
Free trial: No
Pricing: Contact vendor for pricing.
Churnly.ai offers full visibility of customer behavior, providing Customer Success teams with insights into feature usage and key metrics. It tracks every stage of the customer journey, including product adoption, engagement, and renewal, to identify customers at the highest risk of churn. By understanding customer lifecycle changes, businesses can build a data-driven customer success process that reduces churn risk.
The software utilizes machine learning and artificial intelligence developed by a team of PhD data scientists. It analyzes customer data, permutates millions of factors, and predicts which customers are likely to leave. The accuracy of the predictive model ranges from 92-96 percent, equipping businesses with actionable information to take preventive action.
Churnly.ai integrates with various systems, including CRMs, customer support, product billing, and email platforms.
All in all, Churnly.ai's strengths lie in its AI-powered churn prediction capabilities, accurate predictive models, comprehensive integrations, and data-driven insights. By leveraging these features, businesses can better understand customer needs, identify at-risk customers, and take proactive measures to reduce churn and improve customer retention.
10. Qualtrics XM Frontline
Qualtrics is an experience management software that helps businesses understand and improve the customer experience.
Use cases: Experience Management, Churn Prediction, Customer Journey Optimization.
Integrations: Salesforce, Trello, Slack, Zendesk, Hubspot, Tableau and more.
Free trial: No
Pricing: Contact vendor for pricing.
One of their products, Qualtrics XM, is a leading tool for experience management. It allows businesses to automatically identify and address any friction points across all customer touchpoints. With Qualtrics XM, businesses can collect feedback, analyze data, and gain insights to enhance customer satisfaction and drive business growth.
Specifically, Qualtrics XM can be helpful in churn prediction, where it provides capabilities such as Customer Journey Optimization, Contact Center Analytics, and CrossXM. These features allow businesses to analyze customer interactions, track customer journeys, identify potential areas of dissatisfaction, and develop strategies to improve customer retention.
In the context of churn prediction, Qualtrics XM Frontline can be extremely insightful. By identifying potential dissatisfaction areas, businesses can develop targeted strategies to improve customer retention and reduce churn.
Now that you’ve made a decision…what?
Customer churn prediction is a complex process that becomes even more difficult when customers do not openly express their dissatisfaction. Churn prediction involves analyzing data to forecast when a customer may stop using a product or service. However, there are several common mistakes that can ultimately undermine the accuracy of churn prediction models. To ensure that churn prediction is as accurate as possible, it is critical to identify potential sources of error and take steps to mitigate them.
Customer churn prediction mistake #1: Not tracking the product champion
- Product champions are influential users who made the buying decision or heavily influenced it.
- Not tracking the actions of the product champion can lead to a false understanding of customer health and missed churn risk identification.
- Solutions include tracking the behavior of the product champion separately, implementing proper product usage tracking, and setting up dashboards or alerts to identify unengaged champions.
Customer churn prediction mistake #2: Prioritizing product usage over implementation during onboarding
- Low engagement with key features during onboarding can indicate churn risk.
- During onboarding, focus on actions required for setup rather than product usage.
- Use different health scores for users in the onboarding phase, organize accounts into separate segments, and define health scores that favor relevant actions for each segment.
Customer Churn Prediction Mistake #3: Not normalizing usage rate for population
- Normalize the usage rate by dividing the number of times users interact with a product by the total number of users at a company.
- Failure to normalize usage rates can lead to misinterpretation of user health and potential churn signals.
- Track critical interactions, the number of users, and create metrics that provide normalized data.
Customer Churn Prediction Mistake #4: Only considering current customer health, not the change over time
- Focus on tracking trends over time rather than just the current state.
- Establish historical tracking of metrics and health scores.
- Build automated workflows to detect significant changes in customer health.
- Consider taking action for customers trending positively in certain categories, as they may be good candidates for upselling or targeting by the sales team.
Additional tips for predicting churn
- Collect and analyze customer data regularly to identify patterns and trends.
- Use predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to forecast customer churn.
- Establish keyKPIs and metrics that correlate with churn.
- Implement customer satisfaction surveys and feedback mechanisms to gather information directly from customers.
- Monitor customer behavior, such as usage patterns, engagement levels, and customer support interactions.
- Implement personalized customer retention strategies based on identified risk factors.
- Foster strong relationships with customers through proactive communication and addressing pain points.
Apart from preventing churn, these tools also help companies to increase revenue by enabling them to identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling to customers. For instance, if the analysis shows that a customer who is on a basic service package engages with a particular feature more than those on higher packages, the company can suggest upgrading to a higher package tailored to their needs.
Remember, accurate churn prediction requires a combination of data analysis, understanding customer behavior, and implementing appropriate strategies to mitigate churn risks. It is important to continually refine and adapt these methods to optimize customer retention and business growth.